Dark Matter Technologies CEO Sean Dugan Shares Vision For Company

The new CEO of Dark Matter Technologies is focused on delivering value for clients and helping lenders thrive.

Sean Dugan says that it all starts with the company’s culture. 

“Our clients will absolutely see an impact on their business on whatever culture that we build at Dark Matter, so that culture will be highly communicative, very transparent, and collaborative,” Dugan said in a recent interview with The Mortgage Note.

Dugan lives in northern California and has been in the industry for over 20 years. The last 14 have been with the company.

“I’ve got a strong understanding of the mortgage tech space, really deep and meaningful relationships with clients as well as our employees, and I have a strong vision of where to take Dark Matter,” Dugan said.

Dugan’s vision has three tenets: value, growth, and simplicity.

Driving value for clients goes without saying, Dugan said.

“If we’re not creating efficiencies in automation and driving the cost to originate down, then we’re not spending our time in the right areas, so that will be, once again, a keen focus for Dark Matter,” he said.

Dugan said they are looking to grow the organization. They will be active in the acquisition market as they continue to grow the company’s stable of products and services.

Dugan said there will be a keen focus on simplicity in their business model and products. That means simplifying administrative tools as well as making it easier and more cost-effective for vendor partners to integrate their services with the Dark Matter ecosystem.

Company leaders at Dark Matter announced their expansion into the servicing market in February.

At the time, Dugan said adding a servicing platform fulfills a critical need for many of their clients, enabling them to expand servicing operations and improve their flexibility.

“The collaboration between our teams is already driving innovation across the product family and will help our clients operate more efficiently and stay in compliance throughout the entire loan lifecycle. We plan on making sure that this industry-proven product becomes a staple within the servicing space,” he said.

During his interview with The Mortgage Note, Dugan said their platform supports all types of loans, including reverse mortgages, from a servicing capacity.

The servicing technology industry needs competition, he added.

“It’s an area that is underserved. There are only a couple of providers,” Dugan said. “We think this is an area of the market that needs competition, and we’re very excited to throw our hat in the ring.”

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Dugan said AI is here to stay, but he doesn’t see it taking over the industry completely.

Dugan explained that humans will always be needed to make underwriting decisions, but predictive AI and automation can help.

They are focused on leveraging AI for document analysis.

“We’ve got a very robust decisioning engine as well as the industry’s best exception-based workflow,” Dugan said.

He explained that as long as a loan meets a lender’s criteria, it can go through an exception-based process and move forward without being touched by a human. If it falls outside the criteria, then the loan is pulled and delivered to a person who can analyze the loan information more closely.

This provides greater efficiency and allows a client’s employees to focus more time on complex, specialized loans, Dugan said.

#artificialintelligence #loanservicing #mortgagenews